I’d like to start a nail polish blog where I do reviews and become famous and nail polish companies start sending me free samples to review, but I can tell you right now I don’t have the patience for taking and uploading good photographs so that’s out. It’s too bad because I’m becoming quite the nerd about this stuff. I can talk about formulas and drag and cuticle pooling and scattered holo vs. bar glitter with the best of ’em.

Here are some shitty cell phone pics of some stuff I’ve done to my nails recently, though! And I’ll tell you about the polishes in case you care.

Two coats of OPI Love Angel Music Baby (a matte gold with amazing gorgeous easy application) with two coats of ORLY Go Deeper (a dark blue jelly with aqua sparkles in it), coated in a shitload of Sally Hansen Diamond Flash topcoat. The picture comes nowhere near capturing the mermaidy fabulousness of this manicure. Also I haven’t cleaned the edges up yet so it looks more raggedy than it’s gonna.

The manicure I gave myself for Xmas when I was going to MIne’s place and wanted to look a bit extra fancy. Two coats of OPI Black Onyx (a stark black creme) with clumsily freehanded shiny pewter French tips in some weird brand of polish they had at the grocery store for a buck. Coated in a shitload of Diamond Flash topcoat.

French manicure comprised of one clumsily freehanded coat of Sally Hansen Xtreme Wear White On (a pretty decently opaque white creme – my biggest issue with it was that the brush kept leaving bristle-streaks in it. I might actually use one of my softer paintbrushes next time) at the tips and then two coats of Sally Hansen Hard As Nails Hard-ly There (a really sheer kinda green/gold shimmery thing) overtop of it all.

I was longing for Springtime so I did this “wet leaf” kind of look with OPI Front Lawn (which was annoyingly sheer – this is four coats and there’s still visible nail line. And it stained my nails yellow btw) topped with Revlon Matte Topcoat and then dotted with Diamond Flash topcoat to make shiny little splatters of rain.

Make … er… yours(?) take pictures and upload them to your computer or a flash drive or google drive? I’ve heard repeatedly that getting good nail polish photos can be difficult, but that might be worth a try?